Ian here on 31st January. I think I'm happy for the offending sentence just to come out and to lose that point. The audience is one of practitioners, they'll know what I mean.
Thanks.
Hello again, Ian here on 18th January 2010. I've realised I wanted to change the bit in my essay about volunteer tutors - basically expunge the specifics. I've coloured the sentences thusly in the essay. I don't think I should be so specifically critical.
Ian do you want to rewrite the offending sentences? I agree they are not fine as they stand but I think they make a relevant point.
'Volunteers sometimes feel too much is expected of them when they are not only expected to commit their time but also required to undertake what they see as unnecessary and onerous training eg refresher training in equalities or even initial training' might be a way... Chris
Hello. Here's my essay. I think it's depersonalised but if anybody spots anything that seems revealing, please let me know.
Look forward to seeing folk on 21st.
Ian
I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting on to the page itself so that others can comment directly - please use a different colour font if you do! (Though you can always see who added what by the page history) chris PS change colour with the T and circle icon
Hi Ian
I enjoyed reading this - I had thought about talking about 1:1 volunteers for my essay, but didn't think it would be very easy. I like the way you have developed it all, and the ideas you bring out. Couldn't see any personal stuff at all - one tiny typo, but couldn't work out how to use the "T and circle icon" We can look at stuff like that next week probably. Looking forward to meeting up again - sounds like you're just coming to do your Christmas shopping.....
Joyce
Thanks, Joyce. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I hope all my Christmas shopping will be done by Monday - if not, I will be in crisis. Look forward to seeing you then. Ian.
see you are in crisis - chris
I’m going to consider the work I’ve been doing with three numeracy learners in Moray, in the light of the theoretical and practical concerns raised by the Understanding Literacies course. Coming into tutoring from the ITALL course, I carried a notion of social practices in literacy that was expressed as a learner-centred way of working, responding to learners’ interests and motivations. The Understanding Literacies course has raised issues for me about a more penetrating application of the concept. It is also making me ask how that would manifest itself in the room with the learner and the tutor. At the same time, a new financial settlement (or unsettlement) around literacies funding in Scotland may privilege accreditation as a consequence of government-driven priorities that are more concerned with the potential economic roles of learners rather than ideas about personal development and social good. My challenge is how I can re-educate myself in terms of a social practices approach to learning and integrate that into the accredited learning process.
A traditional view of literacy and numeracy was of what has been called a “literacy ladder” (Crowther, Hamilton and Tett, 2001b), a process of mastering increasingly complex skills which exist somehow independently of users – they are there to be acquired, if the learner has the opportunity or ability. Failure sees the learner in deficit – illiterate. The role of adult education would be to provide another chance for these skills to be acquired, post-school.
This can be contrasted with the social practices model that has informed adult literacy and numeracy (ALN) in Scotland since devolution in 1999 and publication of Adult Literacy and Numeracy in Scotland in 2001. In the Scottish definition, literacy and numeracy are “[t]he ability to read, write and use numeracy, to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners” (Scottish Executive, 2001, p.7). Literacy, then, is about the ability to use texts and numbers to act in and upon the world. The social practices model that has been proposed by the workers in what are called the New Literacies Studies (for example, Street, 2001) is close to this. The social practices model emphasises that the contexts – or domains – in which literacy activities take place are not all equal, since powerful institutions, such as education, tend to support dominant literacy practices (Barton and Hamilton, 2000). The concept of literacy or illiteracy then becomes not an objective state but a judgement with reference to a particular definition of literacy. The social practices model advocates that we recognise literacy and numeracy as practices – activities, often customary or repeated ones, involving words and numbers which not only have a purposeful outcome, but have meaning to the practitioner and are situated in place, time, social class, gender and so on. They are a social practice because all these aspects link literacy and numeracy events into the context in which they are undertaken and meanings and outcomes are understood by others in that social context or domain. But they are also individual and personal, being expressions of the practitioner’s life history (Barton and Hamilton, 2000; Street, 2001). The starting propositions are, “What can you do?”, to encourage learners to recognise their existing skills and, “What do you want to do?”
This course has made me question how much of what I’ve been doing with learners has actually taken the social practices model into account and made me realise that I’m not even sure what the model looks like when it’s converted into a learning situation in a room in the community centre. A further element is that I’ve been helping learners towards accreditation at SCQF level 4, the highest level of accreditation the service I work in can propose candidates for, so the issues of “curriculum” and of reaching externally set standards impinge. I have to question whether or not I’m delivering something that’s a sort of “deficit model lite”.
I have worked with three numeracy learners over the last eight months or so and all of them have stated that getting a qualification is their objective, in order to demonstrate competency to prospective employers. This was also the experience of researchers in a NIACE research project, which reported that many adult Learners have a poor experience of learning at school and that most “reported ‘getting a qualification’ as the main reason for doing a numeracy course, with ‘getting a better job’ being the second most popular response” (Swain, Newmarch and Gormley 2007, p2). Learners’ self-perceptions are therefore informed by dominant discourses of mainstream education, that students should acquire competencies that can be examined, and that once examined, those competencies will lead to economic success.
This also brings with it an expectation of a certain kind of teaching and so there’s a potential mismatch between what the learner wants and what the tutor thinks they ought to have. It is to be expected that many learners will bring the deficit or “banking” model of learning into the adult literacies setting, since for many that will be the experience of learning that meeting with a tutor will be reminiscent of. Meanwhile, I arrived from the ITALL course excited by the idea of literacies and numeracies as social practices and thinking that accredited learning was something of a distraction from learners learning what they really needed to know. I’m not saying this is what I was taught but it was probably what I thought.
My first learner when I was a volunteer tutor, A, was keen to get accreditation, a wish I was slow to respond to and which deprived her of a sense of direction and achievement. Indeed, as I wrote in an assignment for the ITALL course, “She is also keen to sit some sort of a test and I think I’ve been a bit reluctant for her to
do this but without really questioning my own response properly or discussing my reluctance with the coordinator” (unpublished essay, 2008). This learner’s expectations were closely aligned with her project to make good for things that happened in her school education. I think she wanted to feel she was being taught and she wanted a very structured approach. This emerged in a lengthy review the learner and I undertook over two sessions at the end of 2008, which mostly revealed the gulf between my learner’s expectations and what I’d actually been doing. My write-up of the review records that, “We agreed to have a more formal framework for sessions to consist of: Topic Homework Marking Revision.” Further along is my rather plaintive note that, “I wanted [A] to be clear that she was responsible for her learning and that if the sessions weren’t working for her, she could say so,” (unpublished learning review, 2008). This reads rather uncomfortably as a piece of buck-passing rather than a route to empowerment! It raises issues about the competence of a volunteer tutor to respond to a complex educational situation and I will consider that issue below.
With the two numeracy learners I meet with now, both working towards SCQF Core Skills Numeracy level 4 and approaching assessment, it has been a rather curriculum-driven process, progressing through topics in the Numeracy Pack series and using other adult basic education numeracy texts. How do I refer to the social practice model? Well, I use lots of real-world examples of, for example, percentages for VAT (and changing VAT, of course), discounts, prices increases, inflation, deflation. We consider practical applications – DIY, cooking, calorie control. I’ve tried to contextualise the way certain vocabularies around numeracy are used. In the media, quantities are often expressed inexactly and it’s worth asking why. Why is the statement “half the population think x” acceptable when it’s actually 44% of the population that think x? Or “house prices have fallen by a fifth, “ when they’ve actually fallen significantly less in many places? Who is speaking when numbers are used in this way? The sessions are discursive, informal. I encourage the learners to reflect on their learning and to look at numeracy events in their day to day lives. We review individual learning plans and assessment plans and the learners have the opportunity tell me how it’s going and I ask questions like, “Are we doing what you want to do?” I expect that what I do is similar to what a lot of adult learning tutors do.
It’s an approach that’s certainly learner-directed. It isn’t school. But does it really take on the social practices model? It is certainly informed by a desire to equip learners with more tools with which to work upon the world. We live in a number saturated world (Baynham, 2006) and yet – or maybe even because of that – 71% of adults in Scotland have numeracy levels that impact negatively on employability and life chances (Scottish Government, 2008b). My experience with the SCQF level 4 learners was that a maths problem on the page of a maths book was a very different problem to a maths problem as presented in the cacophony of information in the real world. I was using the side of a cornflake packet as a maths exercise. It was actually about determining the calories in semi-skimmed milk, something that can be calculated from the packet information using a sequence of arithmetic operations in a particular order, absolutely in accordance with the SCQF Core Skills Numeracy Level 4 standard. The learners struggled to determine which was the pertinent information. It’s a text at the centre of official discourses around nutrition and labelling, and commercial responses to concerns about health (cornflakes were the original health food, of course!) It reveals itself to very be powerful in its density and complexity, its mix of words, numbers and symbols. It all seems potent with “meaning” and yet that meaning remains exclusive. It is possible that the packet functions to disguise an interesting real-world observation: I doubt if 30g of cornflakes is, for most people, a portion.
While one could argue with justification that I was putting the labelling information to a use for which it wasn’t intended, it nevertheless revealed that if you actually let the real world into the room, the problem (the sum) becomes very different. Campaigners for simpler food labelling have a point. The message for me is that my approach to numeracy, if it is to genuinely useful in the world, has to be much more strongly grounded in real world texts and promote the critical awareness of learners.
A second aspect of my work with these numeracy learners is that they are seeking accreditation and this is another interface between what happens in the community centre learning space and the world of policy and politics. Accreditation is moving up the agenda of ALN in Scotland. One can see this just in the significant proportion of my time spent either on my own accredited learning (ITALL, Understanding Literacies, A1 assessors units) or about delivering accredited learning (Core Skills). I do not question the value of accreditation as a goal and a motivator for learners, a demonstration of hard-won skills and new confidence. But there is a danger of accreditation being privileged as an outcome of adult learning and of it becoming an end itself, and of being a kind of crude measure of success, measurable and demonstrable and targetable. This may be what is reflected in the response of local authorities to the new financial regime of Single Outcome Agreements which is affecting ALN funding.
Since 2001, £65 million funding to help adults improve their literacies has been distributed through literacies partnerships led by local authorities (Scottish Government website, undated). 2007 saw a change a government and the introduction of single outcome agreements from last year brought about the end of ear-marked funding. The adult literacy partnerships may no longer be funded and ALN has to take its chances within an ecology of themes which derive from a stated economic “purpose” for government (Scottish Government, 2007). Indeed, the Scottish Government’s report on Scotland’s Adult Literacy and Numeracy Strategy 2007/2008 is emphatic: “The Government’s move to an outcome-based approach means that all public services are now expected to be able to demonstrate how they contribute to the Government’s purpose and strategic objectives, through a national performance framework” (Scottish Government 2008, p.2). Accreditation is a way of demonstrating success – it’s measurable and targets could be set. One could also see ALN linked more explicitly into employability. In 2009-10, Essential Skills appears under National Outcome 3 “We are better educated, more skilled and more successful, renowned for our research and innovation” (Moray Community Planning Partnership, 2009) and all the local outcomes are about enrolments in FE and HE or else about increasing “the level of qualifications at all levels” in the workforce (Moray Community Planning Partnership, 2009, p18). In 2008-9 ALN came under National Outcome 7, “We have tackled the significant inequalities in Scottish society” (Althea Forbes, pers. comm.), raising the prospect that improving literacies delivers not just economic gains but social and collective goods beyond individual ones (Hamilton, Macrae and Tett, 2001).
It is worth looking at the English model of ALN that has been enacted in response to the Moser report, A Fresh Start, of 1999. This seems to have aligned adult literacy and numeracy with a project of human resource development whilst promoting narrow functional models of literacy and numeracy through a national curriculum called Skills for Life (Hamilton, Macrae and Tett, 2001). Skills for Life is more prescriptive than the SQA’s Core Skills.
It is perhaps in the Core Skills framework that there lies a third way for the future of ALN in Scotland. The advantage of the Core Skills units is that if they’re not quite a blank canvas, they’re only lightly sketched. They define outcomes but not how those outcomes must be achieved. So the learning process is negotiable between the tutor and learner, as is the means of assessment, for example, by a written test, by oral examination, by observation. There’s a free space that can be defined by the learning process within the sanctioned framework. Just as marginalisation of adult basic education may actually have allowed it “creative space” in which to operate (Hamilton, Macrae and Tett, 2001, p26), as long as ALN delivers the right ticks in outcome boxes, and enough of them, practitioners may be free from more prescriptive action in terms of curriculum and approach.
My work with learners continues to reveal to me the application and imagination required to arrive at effective teaching approaches that address the interests and needs of individual learners. The service adult learners receive needs to be professionalised or at least “up-skilled” in terms of how to teach. Volunteer tutors may now undertake the ITALL course but that barely scratches the surface of how to teach, while the paid workers are usually part-time and their oversight of volunteers limited. Adult literacies is still largely delivered by volunteers, in situation that might be defined as “charitable” and that thereby constructs literacies learning as a gift rather than a right and that can be a justification for all sorts of compromises. Undoubtedly, the volunteer/learner relationship could be a model for a partnership or dialogic form of learning outside of the teacher/pupil traditions. But it remains an ambition that literacies and numeracies will be delivered by qualified staff, the “highly skilled, increasingly experienced and professional tutoring” envisioned by, for example, Moray Adult Literacies Partnership (MALP 2006, p10). If pressure to deliver primarily to an accreditation outcome grows, it will be up to informed practitioners to hold the focus on learner-centred and social practice model tutoring.
The academic work of the Understanding Literacies course has been a challenge to my assumptions and I know that I must question my tutoring. The inquiry of how I do that begins now, with a return to An Adult Literacy and Numeracy Curriculum Framework For Scotland and allowing myself opportunities to be informed communities of practice such as CoPAL, while not forgetting my immediate colleagues and the management support available (I work in a dispersed rural team.) I hope to continue accessing professional development and to continue to challenge myself as I increase in experience and competence as an adult literacy and numeracy tutor.
2757 words
References
BARTON, D., and HAMILTON, M. (2000). Literacy Practices. In: BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. and IVANIC, R., eds (2000). Situated Literacies. London: Routledge. pp7-15
BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. and IVANIC, R., eds (2000). Situated Literacies.
London: Routledge
BAYNHAM, M. (2006). Power of Numbers: Research Agendas in a Number-saturated World. In: TETT, L. ed, Adult Literacy, Numeracy and Language Berkshire, McGrawHill Education
CROWTHER, J., HAMILTON, M. and TETT, L., eds (2001a). Powerful Literacies. Leicester: NIACE
CROWTHER, J., HAMILTON, M. and TETT, L., (2001b). Powerful Literacies: an introduction. In: CROWTHER, J., HAMILTON, M. and TETT, L., eds (2001). Powerful Literacies. Leicester: NIACE
HAMILTON, M. (2000). Expanding the new literacy studies: using photographs to explore literacy as social practice. In: BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. and IVANIC, R., eds (2000). Situated Literacies. London: Routledge
HAMILTON, M., MACRAE, C. and TETT, L. (2001). Powerful Literacies: the policy context. In: CROWTHER, J., HAMILTON, M. and TETT, L., eds (2001). Powerful Literacies. Leicester: NIACE
MORAY COMMUNITY PLANNING PARTNERSHIP (2009). Single Outcome Agreement 2009/10 Elgin: Moray Community Planning Partnership [accessed online. Available: http://www.yourmoray.org.uk/News/FeatureInDetail Accessed:13/06/2009]
STREET, B (2001) Contexts for Literacy work: the ‘new orders’ and the ‘new literacy studies’. In: CROWTHER, J., HAMILTON, M. and TETT, L. Powerful Literacies. Leicester: NIACE pp13-22
SWAIN, J., NEWMARCH, B. and GORMLEY, O., (2007). Numeracy. Leicester: NIACE
Ian here on 31st January. I think I'm happy for the offending sentence just to come out and to lose that point. The audience is one of practitioners, they'll know what I mean.
Thanks.
Hello again, Ian here on 18th January 2010. I've realised I wanted to change the bit in my essay about volunteer tutors - basically expunge the specifics. I've coloured the sentences thusly in the essay. I don't think I should be so specifically critical.
Ian do you want to rewrite the offending sentences? I agree they are not fine as they stand but I think they make a relevant point.
'Volunteers sometimes feel too much is expected of them when they are not only expected to commit their time but also required to undertake what they see as unnecessary and onerous training eg refresher training in equalities or even initial training' might be a way... Chris
Hello. Here's my essay. I think it's depersonalised but if anybody spots anything that seems revealing, please let me know.
Look forward to seeing folk on 21st.
Ian
I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting on to the page itself so that others can comment directly - please use a different colour font if you do! (Though you can always see who added what by the page history) chris
PS change colour with the T and circle icon
Hi Ian
I enjoyed reading this - I had thought about talking about 1:1 volunteers for my essay, but didn't think it would be very easy. I like the way you have developed it all, and the ideas you bring out. Couldn't see any personal stuff at all - one tiny typo, but couldn't work out how to use the "T and circle icon" We can look at stuff like that next week probably. Looking forward to meeting up again - sounds like you're just coming to do your Christmas shopping.....
Joyce
Thanks, Joyce. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I hope all my Christmas shopping will be done by Monday - if not, I will be in crisis. Look forward to seeing you then. Ian.
see you are in crisis - chris
I’m going to consider the work I’ve been doing with three numeracy learners in Moray, in the light of the theoretical and practical concerns raised by the Understanding Literacies course. Coming into tutoring from the ITALL course, I carried a notion of social practices in literacy that was expressed as a learner-centred way of working, responding to learners’ interests and motivations. The Understanding Literacies course has raised issues for me about a more penetrating application of the concept. It is also making me ask how that would manifest itself in the room with the learner and the tutor. At the same time, a new financial settlement (or unsettlement) around literacies funding in Scotland may privilege accreditation as a consequence of government-driven priorities that are more concerned with the potential economic roles of learners rather than ideas about personal development and social good. My challenge is how I can re-educate myself in terms of a social practices approach to learning and integrate that into the accredited learning process.
A traditional view of literacy and numeracy was of what has been called a “literacy ladder” (Crowther, Hamilton and Tett, 2001b), a process of mastering increasingly complex skills which exist somehow independently of users – they are there to be acquired, if the learner has the opportunity or ability. Failure sees the learner in deficit – illiterate. The role of adult education would be to provide another chance for these skills to be acquired, post-school.
This can be contrasted with the social practices model that has informed adult literacy and numeracy (ALN) in Scotland since devolution in 1999 and publication of Adult Literacy and Numeracy in Scotland in 2001. In the Scottish definition, literacy and numeracy are “[t]he ability to read, write and use numeracy, to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners” (Scottish Executive, 2001, p.7). Literacy, then, is about the ability to use texts and numbers to act in and upon the world. The social practices model that has been proposed by the workers in what are called the New Literacies Studies (for example, Street, 2001) is close to this. The social practices model emphasises that the contexts – or domains – in which literacy activities take place are not all equal, since powerful institutions, such as education, tend to support dominant literacy practices (Barton and Hamilton, 2000). The concept of literacy or illiteracy then becomes not an objective state but a judgement with reference to a particular definition of literacy. The social practices model advocates that we recognise literacy and numeracy as practices – activities, often customary or repeated ones, involving words and numbers which not only have a purposeful outcome, but have meaning to the practitioner and are situated in place, time, social class, gender and so on. They are a social practice because all these aspects link literacy and numeracy events into the context in which they are undertaken and meanings and outcomes are understood by others in that social context or domain. But they are also individual and personal, being expressions of the practitioner’s life history (Barton and Hamilton, 2000; Street, 2001). The starting propositions are, “What can you do?”, to encourage learners to recognise their existing skills and, “What do you want to do?”
This course has made me question how much of what I’ve been doing with learners has actually taken the social practices model into account and made me realise that I’m not even sure what the model looks like when it’s converted into a learning situation in a room in the community centre. A further element is that I’ve been helping learners towards accreditation at SCQF level 4, the highest level of accreditation the service I work in can propose candidates for, so the issues of “curriculum” and of reaching externally set standards impinge. I have to question whether or not I’m delivering something that’s a sort of “deficit model lite”.
I have worked with three numeracy learners over the last eight months or so and all of them have stated that getting a qualification is their objective, in order to demonstrate competency to prospective employers. This was also the experience of researchers in a NIACE research project, which reported that many adult Learners have a poor experience of learning at school and that most “reported ‘getting a qualification’ as the main reason for doing a numeracy course, with ‘getting a better job’ being the second most popular response” (Swain, Newmarch and Gormley 2007, p2). Learners’ self-perceptions are therefore informed by dominant discourses of mainstream education, that students should acquire competencies that can be examined, and that once examined, those competencies will lead to economic success.
This also brings with it an expectation of a certain kind of teaching and so there’s a potential mismatch between what the learner wants and what the tutor thinks they ought to have. It is to be expected that many learners will bring the deficit or “banking” model of learning into the adult literacies setting, since for many that will be the experience of learning that meeting with a tutor will be reminiscent of. Meanwhile, I arrived from the ITALL course excited by the idea of literacies and numeracies as social practices and thinking that accredited learning was something of a distraction from learners learning what they really needed to know. I’m not saying this is what I was taught but it was probably what I thought.
My first learner when I was a volunteer tutor, A, was keen to get accreditation, a wish I was slow to respond to and which deprived her of a sense of direction and achievement. Indeed, as I wrote in an assignment for the ITALL course, “She is also keen to sit some sort of a test and I think I’ve been a bit reluctant for her to
do this but without really questioning my own response properly or discussing my reluctance with the coordinator” (unpublished essay, 2008). This learner’s expectations were closely aligned with her project to make good for things that happened in her school education. I think she wanted to feel she was being taught and she wanted a very structured approach. This emerged in a lengthy review the learner and I undertook over two sessions at the end of 2008, which mostly revealed the gulf between my learner’s expectations and what I’d actually been doing. My write-up of the review records that, “We agreed to have a more formal framework for sessions to consist of: Topic Homework Marking Revision.” Further along is my rather plaintive note that, “I wanted [A] to be clear that she was responsible for her learning and that if the sessions weren’t working for her, she could say so,” (unpublished learning review, 2008). This reads rather uncomfortably as a piece of buck-passing rather than a route to empowerment! It raises issues about the competence of a volunteer tutor to respond to a complex educational situation and I will consider that issue below.
With the two numeracy learners I meet with now, both working towards SCQF Core Skills Numeracy level 4 and approaching assessment, it has been a rather curriculum-driven process, progressing through topics in the Numeracy Pack series and using other adult basic education numeracy texts. How do I refer to the social practice model? Well, I use lots of real-world examples of, for example, percentages for VAT (and changing VAT, of course), discounts, prices increases, inflation, deflation. We consider practical applications – DIY, cooking, calorie control. I’ve tried to contextualise the way certain vocabularies around numeracy are used. In the media, quantities are often expressed inexactly and it’s worth asking why. Why is the statement “half the population think x” acceptable when it’s actually 44% of the population that think x? Or “house prices have fallen by a fifth, “ when they’ve actually fallen significantly less in many places? Who is speaking when numbers are used in this way? The sessions are discursive, informal. I encourage the learners to reflect on their learning and to look at numeracy events in their day to day lives. We review individual learning plans and assessment plans and the learners have the opportunity tell me how it’s going and I ask questions like, “Are we doing what you want to do?” I expect that what I do is similar to what a lot of adult learning tutors do.
It’s an approach that’s certainly learner-directed. It isn’t school. But does it really take on the social practices model? It is certainly informed by a desire to equip learners with more tools with which to work upon the world. We live in a number saturated world (Baynham, 2006) and yet – or maybe even because of that – 71% of adults in Scotland have numeracy levels that impact negatively on employability and life chances (Scottish Government, 2008b). My experience with the SCQF level 4 learners was that a maths problem on the page of a maths book was a very different problem to a maths problem as presented in the cacophony of information in the real world. I was using the side of a cornflake packet as a maths exercise. It was actually about determining the calories in semi-skimmed milk, something that can be calculated from the packet information using a sequence of arithmetic operations in a particular order, absolutely in accordance with the SCQF Core Skills Numeracy Level 4 standard. The learners struggled to determine which was the pertinent information. It’s a text at the centre of official discourses around nutrition and labelling, and commercial responses to concerns about health (cornflakes were the original health food, of course!) It reveals itself to very be powerful in its density and complexity, its mix of words, numbers and symbols. It all seems potent with “meaning” and yet that meaning remains exclusive. It is possible that the packet functions to disguise an interesting real-world observation: I doubt if 30g of cornflakes is, for most people, a portion.
While one could argue with justification that I was putting the labelling information to a use for which it wasn’t intended, it nevertheless revealed that if you actually let the real world into the room, the problem (the sum) becomes very different. Campaigners for simpler food labelling have a point. The message for me is that my approach to numeracy, if it is to genuinely useful in the world, has to be much more strongly grounded in real world texts and promote the critical awareness of learners.
A second aspect of my work with these numeracy learners is that they are seeking accreditation and this is another interface between what happens in the community centre learning space and the world of policy and politics. Accreditation is moving up the agenda of ALN in Scotland. One can see this just in the significant proportion of my time spent either on my own accredited learning (ITALL, Understanding Literacies, A1 assessors units) or about delivering accredited learning (Core Skills). I do not question the value of accreditation as a goal and a motivator for learners, a demonstration of hard-won skills and new confidence. But there is a danger of accreditation being privileged as an outcome of adult learning and of it becoming an end itself, and of being a kind of crude measure of success, measurable and demonstrable and targetable. This may be what is reflected in the response of local authorities to the new financial regime of Single Outcome Agreements which is affecting ALN funding.
Since 2001, £65 million funding to help adults improve their literacies has been distributed through literacies partnerships led by local authorities (Scottish Government website, undated). 2007 saw a change a government and the introduction of single outcome agreements from last year brought about the end of ear-marked funding. The adult literacy partnerships may no longer be funded and ALN has to take its chances within an ecology of themes which derive from a stated economic “purpose” for government (Scottish Government, 2007). Indeed, the Scottish Government’s report on Scotland’s Adult Literacy and Numeracy Strategy 2007/2008 is emphatic: “The Government’s move to an outcome-based approach means that all public services are now expected to be able to demonstrate how they contribute to the Government’s purpose and strategic objectives, through a national performance framework” (Scottish Government 2008, p.2). Accreditation is a way of demonstrating success – it’s measurable and targets could be set. One could also see ALN linked more explicitly into employability. In 2009-10, Essential Skills appears under National Outcome 3 “We are better educated, more skilled and more successful, renowned for our research and innovation” (Moray Community Planning Partnership, 2009) and all the local outcomes are about enrolments in FE and HE or else about increasing “the level of qualifications at all levels” in the workforce (Moray Community Planning Partnership, 2009, p18). In 2008-9 ALN came under National Outcome 7, “We have tackled the significant inequalities in Scottish society” (Althea Forbes, pers. comm.), raising the prospect that improving literacies delivers not just economic gains but social and collective goods beyond individual ones (Hamilton, Macrae and Tett, 2001).
It is worth looking at the English model of ALN that has been enacted in response to the Moser report, A Fresh Start, of 1999. This seems to have aligned adult literacy and numeracy with a project of human resource development whilst promoting narrow functional models of literacy and numeracy through a national curriculum called Skills for Life (Hamilton, Macrae and Tett, 2001). Skills for Life is more prescriptive than the SQA’s Core Skills.
It is perhaps in the Core Skills framework that there lies a third way for the future of ALN in Scotland. The advantage of the Core Skills units is that if they’re not quite a blank canvas, they’re only lightly sketched. They define outcomes but not how those outcomes must be achieved. So the learning process is negotiable between the tutor and learner, as is the means of assessment, for example, by a written test, by oral examination, by observation. There’s a free space that can be defined by the learning process within the sanctioned framework. Just as marginalisation of adult basic education may actually have allowed it “creative space” in which to operate (Hamilton, Macrae and Tett, 2001, p26), as long as ALN delivers the right ticks in outcome boxes, and enough of them, practitioners may be free from more prescriptive action in terms of curriculum and approach.
My work with learners continues to reveal to me the application and imagination required to arrive at effective teaching approaches that address the interests and needs of individual learners. The service adult learners receive needs to be professionalised or at least “up-skilled” in terms of how to teach. Volunteer tutors may now undertake the ITALL course but that barely scratches the surface of how to teach, while the paid workers are usually part-time and their oversight of volunteers limited. Adult literacies is still largely delivered by volunteers, in situation that might be defined as “charitable” and that thereby constructs literacies learning as a gift rather than a right and that can be a justification for all sorts of compromises. Undoubtedly, the volunteer/learner relationship could be a model for a partnership or dialogic form of learning outside of the teacher/pupil traditions. But it remains an ambition that literacies and numeracies will be delivered by qualified staff, the “highly skilled, increasingly experienced and professional tutoring” envisioned by, for example, Moray Adult Literacies Partnership (MALP 2006, p10). If pressure to deliver primarily to an accreditation outcome grows, it will be up to informed practitioners to hold the focus on learner-centred and social practice model tutoring.
The academic work of the Understanding Literacies course has been a challenge to my assumptions and I know that I must question my tutoring. The inquiry of how I do that begins now, with a return to An Adult Literacy and Numeracy Curriculum Framework For Scotland and allowing myself opportunities to be informed communities of practice such as CoPAL, while not forgetting my immediate colleagues and the management support available (I work in a dispersed rural team.) I hope to continue accessing professional development and to continue to challenge myself as I increase in experience and competence as an adult literacy and numeracy tutor.
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References
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